Howard Newby

Social class in modern Britain

List of tables Preface Social class and social inequality When is a social class? Constructing the Wright classes Class formation and social mobility The structure of class processes The moral order of a capitalist society Making and unmaking class consciousness Goodbye to social class? Class politics Conclusion Bibliography Appendix - technical details of the British survey Coda - constructing the Goldthorpe classes Index

Locality and rurality: The restructuring of rural social relations

Newby H. (1986) Locality and rurality: the restructuring of rural social relations, Reg. Studies 20, 209–215. This paper reconsiders some of the recent literature on rural social relations in the light of contemporary debate on the process of economic restructuring and the reordering of the urban and regional systems. It reviews the history of community studies in rural sociology and human geography and argues that community studies are best approached as a method of analysis, rather than objects of study in their own right. The paper then considers recent work on the local impact of economic restructuring and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of current research in this field.

The Deferential Dialectic

For more than a decade, the most decisive influence on the empirical study of the British class structure has been the three consecutive electoral victories of the Conservative Party during the 1950 s. The widespread belief that these events reflected some underlying change in the stratification of British society stimulated a new examination of the political attitudes and behaviour of the working class. In sociology this led to the exploration of the ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis culminating in the ‘affluent worker’ study by Goldthorpe and his colleagues and it is, perhaps, a comment on the state of sociological research into the British class structure that this study, together with its associated papers, remains the centre around which much of the debate on social stratification in contemporary Britain continues to revolve. In political science, however, the investigation took a different track. Instead of seeking an explanation of the Conservative electoral successes in terms of the working class becoming more middle class, political scientists sought an explanation in terms of increased working-class ‘deference’. Bagehot was enthusiastically resurrected (a new edition of The English Constitution appeared in 1963), and a spate of studies attempted to assess the ‘deferential’ component of English political culture.

Goodbye to Supervisors

Liberal theories of post-industrial society and Marxist theories of the labour process tend to converge in their respective accounts of the place of supervisors in relation to putative changes in the organisation of work. A common conjecture is that supervisors are progressively being denuded of their powers and functions within industry. This paper uses data from a national sample survey of Britain to discuss the substance of the supervisory role in modern capitalist enterprises. The conclusion reached is that direct supervision in the workplace is not obviously in decline. The data also raise issues about the categories of employment status used in official statistics as well as those of the Goldthorpe class schema.

Economic Restructuring: The British Experience

This article deals with certain aspects of British economic decline. After a short historical review of British economic performance, the phenomenon of deindustrialization is examined. Two major economic theories of deindustrialization are discussed alongside empirical evidence of the recent, rapid decline in Britains manufacturing base and its worsening trade performance in goods and services. The effects of multinational corporations are also briefly examined. In the final section of the article, attention is given to some of the social and political aspects of deindustrialization. In particular, evidence on poverty, unemployment, and living standards in contemporary Britain is discussed in relation to a sociological model that attempts to explain certain apparent paradoxes of British society. This model is an extension of T. H. Marshalls pioneering work on citizenship and social class and serves to highlight both the continuing stabilizing effects of the modern status order and the possibility of further clashes between the competing claims of citizenship and social class.

Distributional Struggle and Moral Order in a Market Society

This paper challenges the widely held view that novel and fundamental changes in the structure of social hierarchy have altered the basis of distributional conflict in modern Britain. Reference to nineteenth-century developments shows that sectionalism, egoism and privatism are not peculiar to the present economic recession. It is then argued that commentators on the left and right alike have oversimplified the relationship between the distributional order of societies, on the one hand, and the specific forms taken by distributional conflicts on the other. This means that the implications of the lack of a capitalist Sittlichkeit (morality or moral order) for social integration may be quite different from those commonly drawn in recent studies.

Farming for Survival: The Small Farmer in the Contemporary Rural Class Structure

The major problem faced by the small farmer is not dissimilar to that faced by other petit-bourgeois groups in contemporary society: how to ensure survival under conditions which threaten increasing economic marginality and eventual extinction. The tenacity of the small farmer in the face of such a threat has, of course, entered the folklore of English1 historical experience. The yeoman virtues of sturdy independence and solitary self-help have long been prized and celebrated as a source of strength in the English national character and, although we shall not be discussing the metaphysical niceties of this viewpoint here, it is worth pointing out that this perspective continues to infect much of the thinking and writing on what has come to be known as the ‘small farm problem’. In this context the small farmer2 has been a ‘problem’ since the state decisively intervened in the organisation and support of British agriculture during and immediately following the Second World War. For a less charitable interpretation of tenacity is obstinacy, and from the perspective of agricultural policy-makers the small farmer represents an obstacle to the rationalisation of British farming along more efficient and cost-effective lines.3 Indeed, since the entry of the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community the small farmer has found himself at the centre of political controversy over the financing of the Common Agricultural Policy, so that the ‘problem’ of small farmers is now not only one which concerns agricultural policy-makers but consumers, too.

AGRICULTURAL WORKERS IN THE CLASS STRUCTURE

A griculture in general and agricultural workers in particular have l \ mainly aroused the interest of sociologists in this country in the context of rural community studies. Unfortunately these studies have by no means dealt with a representative sample of the different types of agriculture carried out in Great Britain, so that a very uneven representation has emerged.^ Because of the historical development of this branch of sociology in Britain, such studies have been confined mainly to those areas where the general pattern of agriculture has been the twentieth-century equivalent erf subsistence farming. The anthropologically-oriented community studies of County Clare, Llanfihangel, Westrigg, Gosforth and Ashworthy^—the major British rural studies—^are all situated in the Highland ZOIK where family labour and mutual help are the norm and the use of hired labour is infrequent. Hence Arensberg and Kimball, Rees and Williams have emphasised the gemeinschaftlich qualities of settlements based on agriculture, while only Littlejohn has analysed a rural community where the social relationships in agriculture are those of employer and employee rather than kinship ties. Moreover, community studies in areas of Ei^land where agriculture has a much more industrialised countenance—such as Pahls study oi the metropolitan fringe in Hertfordshire^—^have concerned themselves with other a^)ects of the social relationships within their locality. Hius while our knowledge of family farming has a fairly sound basis, non-family agricultural workers have been almost entirely overlooked. The more thoroughgoing capitalist system of agriculture in the lowland areas of eastern and south-eastern England remains unexplored. Yet it is here, east of an imaginary line stretching from the Wash to the Isle of Wight,^ that forty per cent, of the agricultural labour force remains concentrated.

Husbands and Wives: The Deferential Dialectic

Attempts to account for the persistent subordination of women to men by the use of existing theories of social stratification have hardly been very successful. In a sense this is not surprising, given that the ‘problem’ of sexual inequality was not one that emerged from within the existing corpus of academic sociological theory, but rather emerged from outside it and forced sociologists interested in stratification to come to terms with it. For this reason, many attempts to explain sexual stratification have consisted of squeezing the phenomenon into pre-existing conceptual categories rather than developing them out of an analysis of the phenomenon itself. These attempts — both functionalist and Marxist — have until recently been, as Acker (1973) has said, just examples of intellectual sexism. Much discussion has revolved around such questions as whether, and in what sense, women are a class, or a caste, or a status group, or some other such concept plucked from the analysis of stratification in other contexts. Apart from being an interesting sidelight on the tendencies towards reification in sociological theory, this illustrates how an implicit concern has been to preserve the validity of existing approaches to stratification in the face of a potentially disconfirming instance, rather than to develop a deeper analysis of sexual inequality.

Class, Culture and Alienation: A Study of Farmers and Farm Workers

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